<p>School meals play a central role in promoting children’s health, learning capacity, social equity, and sustainable food systems. However, school meal outcomes are shaped not only by what is offered on the menu, but also by how the entire school catering system is organised and governed. This multidimensional perspective on school lunch provision remains largely absent from the international literature, which tends to focus primarily on nutritional compliance of meals. This study evaluated and compared school lunch provision in Rezekne (Latvia) and Uppsala (Sweden) using a cross-sectional comparative design. The evaluation was conducted through the development and application of a new multidimensional index integrating menu-level analysis with system-level assessment across six dimensions, assessing weekly lunch menus and lunch-related organisational features over the 2024/2025 study year. The findings indicate that menu-level evaluation alone is insufficient to explain or improve school lunch provision performance. Key determinants include lunch organisational design, serving models, governance capacity, and institutional interactions that translate policy objectives into everyday practice. Overall, the results suggest that effective and sustainable school lunch provision depends less on formal menu standards alone and more on organisational and governance structures that support student choice, flexibility, monitoring, feedback, and continuous improvement. The proposed multidimensional index and empirical findings provide a foundation for comparative, system-level evaluation of school lunch provision and offer practical insights to support context-sensitive improvements across diverse school catering settings.</p>